New Book! Enough About That by Miriam Sagan

 

The Only Dog I’m Walking Is My Mood

My neighbor says no
it’s not a new dog
just the same
old dog.

They live on a slightly fancier part of the cul-de-sac.

Incredible to have grown old
on this very street
over forty years

of terrible pain and minor parties.

Incredible to live at all.

___
Miriam Sagan is the author of over thirty books of poetry, fiction, and memoir. These include Border Line (Cholla Needles, 2022), Shadow on the Minotaur (Red Mountain, 2020), and Star Gazing (Cholla Needles, 2020). She has been a writer in residence in four national parks, Yaddo, MacDowell, Gulkistan in Iceland, Kura Studio in Japan, and other interesting and remote places. She founded and directed the creative writing program at Santa Fe Community College. She works as part of the intergeneration collaborative team Maternal Mitochondria (with Isabel Winson-Sagan) which has produced text installlations in venues ranging from abandoned buildings to galleries to RV parks. Her work has been incised on stoneware as part of two haiku pathways, set to music for the Santa Fe Women’s Ensemble, and left in Little Free Libraries across the country.

Click here to purchase on-line ($6.00)

___

review (originally published on GoodReads) by jacob erin-cilberto, author of 27 a book of poems :

A review of Enough About That (a book of poetry by Miriam Sagan)

In an early poem, Sagan writes:

“There are some things
I could say
about human life
but I’ve forgotten.”

These lines emerge from a piece titled “The Day Before my 70th Birthday.” I am a reader just past my 76th birthday and I have forgotten more than I remember---yet those things I say anyway. Miriam Sagan says them much more brilliantly in this book called Enough About That, and after reading this collection of poems, I cry, “Never enough, never enough.”

In her poem “Chimera,” she poses the question, “Was I asleep or awake?” What we see, what we say, what we do, so often we ask ourselves, “Was this real or was it Memorex?” Much like in the old commercial.

She speaks of “people standing on the roof/ … looking for earth.”

She unearths “A woman has husbands and dogs” and “The little girl can turn into a mermaid.”

She writes about us being “locked into a notion of ourselves” as we wish we would be or do we recognize who we actually are?

In “Lines About Red,” she mentions “the love I/ temporarily possess as mine.” Are our lives something we only rent or possess temporarily? 

In “Miriam,” her namesake poem, she claims:

“I think I have a new name
which I can’t pronounce
Once my name was Miriam
among bulrushes and lotuses
you can call me

Mama and Grandma and Auntie”

Our lived lives give us more names, more identities based on our experiences, interactions and labels attached to us based on who we are and then what we become to others. Maybe this reviewer will one day write: “Once my name was jacob,” for as she says “Every prophet is a midwife.” And midwives birth new children and maybe new identities as well.

In her poem “Omniscience” she writes:

“Should the full moon rise
it won’t find me,
after all, even I
have no idea where I am.”

And then in “Breastbone,” she expresses how

“This pain beneath
my sternum
a story that can neither stop
nor tell itself
all the way to the end.”

The story that rises up to my surface in reading these poems is one of a journey to find self, but just as we are about to take an exit all the way to a solution, we say, “Enough about that.” And then we look for a different “Who we are” exit, starting all over again, don’t we?

So many fellow poets can relate to this stanza from Miriam’s poem “Gnostic” which reads:

“Sometimes I worry
I’m just writing one poem
over and over.”

Or maybe we are just living the same life over and over and thus WE are the poem repeating. Well, enough about that.

In her poem “Kensho,” Sagan brings us all together:

“The tubercular poet, the exhausted traveler,
and the skinny monk,
we lie on our mats
and muse on the differences.
Then suddenly it is one room.

In “How Shall I Live in the Dark?” she refers to life as

It’s just a few nights’
Rental, a temporary
Dwelling place.

Of course
we should love
our neighbors.

…

As to how
we love ourselves----
that is as mysterious
as the waves that
break but aren’t
broken.

In another poem, Miriam says:

Incredible to have grown old
on this very street
over forty years
of terrible pain and minor parties

incredible to have lived at all.

Yes, incredible, isn’t it? Life is like “renting a temporary dwelling place” for our bodies, hearts and souls. Miriam Sagan has rented a dwelling that is an abode for her amazing poetic talent. Oh, that I would love to rent a room in that mind of hers, even if only for one night. But enough about that.

New Issue! Cholla Needles 117

 

Edited by Miriam Sagan
Artwork by Suzanne Sbarge
New literature by:
tina castañares
Art Goodtimes
Hannah Mahoney
Ana Consuelo Matiella
Katie Hart Potapoff
Katherine DiBella Seluja
Baro Shalizi
Michael G. Smith
Edie Tsong
Vie
Richard Vargas
and Margaret Wood

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Yucca Valley, CA 92284

New Issue! Cholla Needles 116

 

Cover by Bonnie Bostrom

A.F. Moritz
Rubén Vizcaíno Valencia
translated by Anthony Seidman
Rick Adang
Ed McManis
Terry Ferkins
Paul B. Roth
Patrice M. Wilson
Arvilla Fee
Duane Anderson
J. Malcolm Garcia
David Larsen
and Jonathan Ferrini

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New Issue! Cholla Needles 115

 

Edited by Juan Delgado
Photography by Kyle Arnold
Poetry by:
molly jane burns
Edward Ferrari
David Garyan
George Hammons
Richard Hishmeh
Allyson Jeffredo
André Katkov
Paul Marion
Giorgio Mobili
William Mohr
s. Nicholas
John Perham
and Chath pierSath

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New Issue! Cholla Needles 114

 

Cover art by Bonnie Bostrom
New literature by:

John Dorroh

Judy K. Mosher

Edward L. Canavan

Arvilla Fee

David Chorlton

Marlene M. Tartaglione

Barry Kritzberg

Bonnie Bostrom

David Larsen

and J. Malcolm Garcia

Click here to purchase on-line ($8.00*)
*includes full color art by David Chorlton*

Available during the month of June at:

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From J. Malcolm Garcia

Favorite items:

Arvilla - The Sound of Thunder--"it thunders like guttered bowling balls." Damn, I'd steal that line if I could.

David L. - The detail in Gossips was impeccable.

David C. - Hawk--Turns grace into mythology/cleans the flesh from its bones. 

spellbinding.

I'm still reading.

From Bonnie Bostrom:

Dear Rich,

Thought I would send comments on the writers in this volume.  I was very impressed.

John Dorroh:  His writing is fresh; the images are stunning and his voice is novel. He moves us into his perspective gently so we share his world.

Judy K. Mosher: i appreciate her obvious love of the natural world and how she creates intimate pictures of it.  Her take on being a crone resonates with me at a visceral level.

Edward l. Canavan: This suite of poems is like an avant garde play. The scenes pull you in, leave you changed. It is a very creative way to present poetry.

Arvilla Fee:  Her ability to take something commonplace and treat it as a rare commodity is fabulous.  The intricacy of her work is compelling and inspiring. I am a fan.

David Chorlton:  His poetry actually leaves me breathless.  The way he understands the processes of nature is unparalleled. He is, in my estimation, one of the finest poets alive today.

Marlene M. Tartaglione: What she does is mind-boggling.  The way she uses color in this collection is masterful.  She draws the reader in, holds us there, and does not let us go until we have surrendered to her vision.  So good.

Barry Kritzberg: His stories! Enchanting and a delight.  Loved his two poets encounters and then the  newspaper clippings in support...genius.

Bonnie Bostrom:  I'm just happy to be in the company of such talented writers.

David Larsen: I was totally charmed by this story.  It is a wonderful portrait of two men in conversation, inviting us into the cafe and letting us feel as though we are right there at the table with them.  Very strong images and great dialog.

J. Malcolm Garcia:  This work floored me.  I was there with the writer through the marvelous intertwining of times, places, people.  It shines a very bright light on a chapter of our history that was dark. It is heart breaking and heart warming.  Kudos.

r soos:  He consistently curates the finest writing by the most talented poets and writers he can find. Those of us privileged to be included, are grateful for his guidance and for giving us such a wonderful venue.

Love,

Bonnie

From Maia:

On The Thermals - David Chorlton in Hawk, knows something most humans don’t—what it is like to be Hawk. You can see this in his series of airy luminous paintings, hear it in his vivid verses. He knows because he has witnessed again and again . He knows because he loves.

What is it like to be a wild creature? Winged predator, perpetually on the edge of starvation, missing more often than catching the warm blooded creatures he hunts to keep living. Yet David, the poet knows too, “it’s peaceful on the thermals...holding by a wingtip to the light.”

He knows beforehand what air never does: “what cut(s) it open” as the hawk dives, claws extended. He feels the descent the ground can’t detect yet. Simultaneously, he carries the terrible and the beautiful, the past and future of intelligent life—that he has been, he will be, the hunter and also the hunted, caught on the claw”. He is the contradictory spirit, knowing panic, and surrender, of the small furred-being, “inside the stomach’s darkness”.

Claw too embodies the hawk both as hapless? creature and also deity. Eloquent dynamic fierce. Hawk flown out of creation myth, the one who arranges with her claw, mountains and rivers, forests

and fields.

For Hawk (or mouse or human) the revelation here might be: “After each passing the air//flows back into the shape it was before.”

From Maia:

Turquoise

            is water, is stone, is a worn chenille robe...

 Bonnie Bostrom invites us into her world through her poems’ resonant, everyday yet extraordinary detail. Inside the “illusion” of rain-coming in “drought troubled lands”. an old woman walks. making friends with death. Her own. The world’s. These two cannot be separated.

 The old woman walks with care...imagines herself a “tortoise, flipped, unable to rise.”  But as she finds herself on the ground, she wonders at the lingering intuition that somehow, even here “real rain is coming.”

 She is elemental, sensing “readiness to die.”  Almost an embrace. Even as, within the subtle or sudden displacement of aging, layers of time and changing points of view render her/our familiars strange and what is close, distant. All she/we can do is learn to savor changes, find out their secrets. Come to make meaning of and to treasure the strangeness. “My walls are starting to smooth/where I use them to navigate…into silence and shadow.”  And so it seems we too might find ways to translate the vertigo of aging, its sudden incapacities, fading of senses, which for so long were our sture guides.

  In the last poem, Adapting to Change, the poet imagines a time after dying, when she would be devoured by fire, wearing  her “favorite garment”, her long lived-in turquoise robe, “a last defense. The flames will be no match/for her fierce spirit.” And “she will abide newly adrift” as ash, sand, wind, water…Living as music lives, in some ancient paradoxical mode, “without the world.”

Maia, June 3, 2026

Book Review - The Trick of Singularity by Kurt Schauppner

The Trick of Singularity
By Kurt A. Schauppner
Reviewed by Greg Gilbert
Available at Raven's Bookstore
69225 29 Palms Highway, Twentynine Palms

 The discerning reader may question the neutrality of a reviewer who was an early editor of Kurt Schauppner’s book, particularly as the review is provided at the request of the author’s publisher and the dedication is to us both. My unbiased suggestion: purchase the book and judge for yourself. Meanwhile, here are my thoughts.

    The title, The Trick of Singularity, suggests a point of infinite density, a state of uniqueness, and a place where physical laws break down; all of which are rightly applied to Schauppner’s book. For example, the narration is presented in past tenses, a topsy-turvy chronology wherein the first two-thirds occur in the recent past and the final one-third in the not-so-recent past, two stories that meet at common point, a singularity named Nathan Lee.

The passage of time is a character throughout the story. In the beginning, Nathan Lee is old, and in the end, young. In both time frames, his proximity to the loss of a loved one is mitigated by his state of being at the “time.”  In the beginning, the protagonist is referred to as Mr. Lee, a formality that is  appropriate for his advanced years. In the book’s conclusion, earlier in Nathan Lee’s life, he is Nathan, a newsman, a member of a profession that’s on life support.

The first two-thirds of the book is set in  a senior center, a place where elders revert to grade school behaviors, where pharmaceuticals are dispensed like communion wafers, and where different rooms are aligned with the residents’ stages of decline. This is where we meet the curmudgeonly Mr. Lee and view the descending arc of his story prior to reading about his earlier ascending arc in the book’s final third.

 In the beginning, which is the conclusion, Mr. Lee’s roommate is The Duke, a solitary figure who is occasionally aware of his advancing dementia. When clear minded, he is wise and insightful, and when he is lost, he is unerringly sweet and described as “the largely safe and asexual and therefore much-loved Mr. Duke.” The person who views the Duke in this kindly manner is, “a faded beauty who reminded Mr. Lee of Margaret Dumont,” a staple in many Marx Brothers movies. Once identified as such, she  remains Margaret throughout the story, the reference to Dumont another iteration of time’s relentless passage.

The all-at-one-point subtheme applies also to race. Mr. Lee’s father’s father was Korean and his father’s mother Japanese while Mr. Lee’s mother was “pure German.” Though a blend of races is not unusual in today’s world, it is germane to the story. Mr. Lee thinks of himself as White, even as the tragicomic tone of the first two-thirds of the book is reminiscent of Yiddish humor due to the author’s knack for transforming misery into comedy, albeit, at times, a bit dark.

The worst days are 100^th birthday celebrations. Family members gather, staff members hang balloons and force hats and other bit of ephemera onto unwilling heads and into unwilling hands, a curiously-decorated cake is purchased from the local grocery store, a junior staff member from the local newspaper is summoned with camera, notepad and wide eyes to record the spectacle.

            A 100 year-old person, usually a woman because most men have the good sense not to live that long, is dragged out of her hospital bed, deposited into a wheelchair, wheeled into a dining room, placed in front of the cake and forced to wear a festive hat that will, at the end of the day, be thrown into the trash and begin it journey to a rapidly-overflowing landfill.

     Overall, the first two-thirds is more humorous than the final third of the book, and that feels right because age is often accompanied by a long view that cannot help but be amused at our shared human folly even as we suffer the pains of decline. The more serious tone of the last third involves a younger Nathan Lee whose unfolding life recalls for the reader how it all concludes in the first section. (No spoilers here.)  

    Young Nathan Lee is a photojournalist for a newspaper inherited by children who decide that “it would not be fun to run a newspaper,” a reference to Citizen Kane and yellow journalism. One day, Nathan photographs a dying man at the scene of an auto collision, and, as a result, suffers the resentment of the man’s loved ones, a story that parallels the decline of his newspaper and the failing health of his true love. Within the arcs of this section, Lee’s true love is “a joyfully zaftig man in the manner of Jackie Gleason or late in life Orson Welles,”  a largeness that anchors young Nathan while sending the book’s younger readers to their search engine of choice. 

    Nathan’s uniqueness is a point where societal norms break down. He is a multiracial man in a profession that, like his true love, is both candid and dying. He is a gay man in a community that views such as an abomination. A neighbor who has made cookies for her grandchild’s church school bake sale has asked him not to attend because, “Oh, well, it’s at our church school and most of those folks are a little more conservative…” even though “everyone knew how neat and clean gay people were.” Though never didactic, this is a book that contextualizes the lives of its characters within the cultural and political milieu of modern life.

    What Kurt Schauppner has provided is a playwright’s novel, a book rich in stage direction, conflicts, and memorable characters. The trick is that the youthful Nathan Lee we meet in the book’s conclusion has yet to become the elder Mr. Lee who we  come to know at the beginning of the book. Thus, the final trick of singularity is achieved within the reader, a point where Mr. Lee, young Nathan, and our own mortality become entangled.  

    A final note: The Trick of Singularity was written and published within our community and, thus, is not the polished gem that multiple editors and publishing teams have scrubbed for a mass market. There is the occasional editing oversight, but this is a substantive and intelligent story by an author of several books, an editor of our local paper, and a neighbor. There are talented authors throughout our high desert and a remarkable little indie publisher, Cholla Needles. When we support them with our patronage, we enrich our sense of community. The Trick of Singularity is a worthy addition to our local canon.

 

 

New Issue! Cholla Needles 113

 

New literature by
Caryn Davidson
Rufus Wright
Arvilla Fee
Joseph Hutchison
Patty Prewitt
James A. Mehrle
Maía
Zaqary Fekete
Beate Sigriddaughter
Michael McGuire
and J. Malcolm Garcia

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Available during the month of May at:

California Welcome Center
56711 29 Palms Hwy 

Yucca Valley, CA 92284

REVIEW ONE BY M a í a:

Dear Writers: Response to Cholla Needles 113­­­­­­

After fully taking in this bold collage of word-built worlds, it felt impossible for me to respond—in words. Though all along, of course, I was responding–bodily and feelingly, to resonant and unlikely juxtapositions of color, weather, landscape and beings…­­­­­­­­

Through each poem/story, I became aware of something underlying and unspoken: quantum-entanglements, invisibilities, inhabiting-spirits of chaotic cities and ravaged forests. Each section of poems or prose finds its own way to ground us in earth, wind, sky, fire—through heartbreak, war, forgetting...death.  “As if to prepare.../to sleep forever.” (Arvilla Fee)

 I came to feel the writers here constituting a kind of tribe “wanting the faith/ to feel the word/not just find it” (Rufus Wright).  “ And suddenly there is sky, sky that knows (we) have waited a long, long time to feel small and infinite again,” (Patty Prewitt).

It’s true that some of our wrong turns are unredeemable. “When you thought you could do better elsewhere, and you were mistaken.” (Beate Sigriddaughter)

In our separate desperate or tedious or curious lives we fear we might have failed to give our full attention to what truly calls. But sometimes strange consolations announce themselves, and we remember,: “our apologies travel... down stairwells and settle…   in other peoples’ dreams.” (Zaqary Fekete)

Heartbreak, war.  ”He recalls jungle patrols when he slept with an arm tied to a tree so he would not roll downhill... He showered once a month. He smelled like earth and moss and mildew.” (J. Malcolm Garcia)

Bewilderment. “Why are the streets and the plaza filled with people knocked to the ground, being kicked, being beaten?”  (Joseph Hutchison)

Still, somehow we long to gather and to sing, “In unity’s embrace, a world divine.” (James  A. Mehrle)  To invite one another.  “Wake up, my love, wake up, see, the day already dawns, the birds already sing, the moon already sets.” (Michael McGuire)

No guarantees, no absolutes. But sometimes—joy—.in the heart of unknowing. “Cycles appear in all the seasons…we too, revolve around an/implacable truth that remains implacably obscured.”         (Caryn Davidson)

**************

First and last, “All of these writers fill me with hope for the future.” Rich Soos

I agree.  Thanks and appreciation to each and every one of you,

-          M a í a

 From Rich - M a í a did such a great job of quoting from each of you on her page, I want to end this with these beautiful words from one of her poems in issue 113:

 This is sorrow, that we never praise

enough, never say deep enough,

the speech of love.

 . . .

 A way for loneliness

to touch Beauty. To see God.

Because in the end

 

how silent words are—

I mean the handful

we know each other by. (M a í a)

REVIEW TWO BY BEATE SIGRIDDAUGHTER:

Inspired by Maía's response to Cholla Needles 113, here's my list of lines that particularly grabbed me in all the fascinating work presented in this issue, with thanks to all of you for writing and to Rich for putting it all together:

 Caryn Davidson:

 the chorus

of voices wanting and needing to know

 

The way things come and go

and yet they still surprise us.

 

The wind is so strong it seems

to push the stars out of place.

 

 Rufus Wright

 learning

to ache for no reason

 

get wherever

before whatever is over

 

Arvilla Fee

 

wished she had the courage to pour herself

over the edge of a cliff

 

 Joseph Hutchison

 

kid made parentless, the lucky bastards

 

a blizzard of tweets, and his followers share each on without reading it

 

 Patty Prewitt

 

I believe in what lasts

without asking permission.

 

A thousand small freedoms

bloom where rules once lived.

 

I step out the gate like a comma finally freed from the sentence I never deserved.

 

grass still grows with its green obedience

  

James A. Mehrle

 

Your laughter will never leave my heart.

  

Maía

 

beyond

the garden wall of her mother-tongue

  

I give my consent—yes

 to love, and the dread of weapons—yes

 

 The Mower Man, he steals the seeds

 sells them back to us

 

 In every human happiness

a taste of elegy—what's here, already

vanishing—

 

 

Zaqary Fekete

 

I realized that in this building, none of us were entirely alone. Our failures leaked upward. Our music vibrated through the ceilings. Our apologies traveled down stairwells and settled in other people's sleep.

 

I refresh the page twice, in case something changes.

 

I wonder if the words I did not read are still waiting where I left them.

     Or if they have already gone quiet without me.

 

 

Michael McGuire

Walls meant a lot to people. Juan Antonio sometimes wondered what they were walling in.

    Or out.

 

J. Malcolm Garcia

Had they died in combat, I would have been allowed to make a story out of it. But they didn't.

He experienced a sense of disappointment, as if none of what he and his unit had done mattered.

Will skyscrapers devour the battlefields where so many died?